August, 2012:

Yesterday, I ran into this news about Darien Library. They were doing a campaign about “Donate Blood and Your Library Fines Waived.” Immediately I thought ‘What a wonderful idea!’ Library fines can be a hassle. Lots of times people accumulate library fines by missing the due dates without intending and then get a headache later on. Library fines are not in any way a positive part of library experience even if they are the result of a user’s own fault.

I was most impressed by the fresh perspective on the whole library fine matter. The campaign by Darien Library was actually addressing this negative issue and changing it to something positive and even exciting. Getting library fines waived is like getting a free cookie. We are drawn to freebies. The condition for the freebie is a great cause – donating blood. This little one-day event page even lists “Facts about blood donation from the Red Cross.”

Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood.

The blood used in an emergency is already on the shelves before the event occurs.

A single car accident victim can require as many as 100 pints of blood.

Roughly 1 pint of blood is given during a donation.

It is a great marketing event that brings in many library patrons’ goodwill with an educational element thrown in. But after I tweeted about this campaign, immediately a few librarians commented about those who are not eligible to donate blood for health or other reasons. And for a moment there, I wondered, ‘Wow that’s right… I didn’t think about that. Is this whole idea discriminatory?’

Then I had a light-bulb moment. No it is not a discriminatory idea. And this is exactly how we kill our own creativity before even it grows out of a seed!

The concern about those who are ineligible to donate blood is legitimate. ‘But’ it disregards a very important fact that what Darien Library is doing is an one-time event (or so I assume). It is a not a standing policy; blood is not an all-the-time accepted means to pay out your library fines (as far as I surmise). Just one day one time, the library is creating an event based upon a cool and interesting idea, that is: ‘Let’s invite those who are willing to donate blood gather at the library location – the bonus is if they have library fines, those fines will be waived!’ Getting library fines waived is just a hook, an excuse for bringing people in and having a good day that is dedicated to a good cause. It’s more like an icing on a cupcake. Yes, it could be that there are some people who would donate blood only truly one hundred percent because they want their library fines waived. But this kind of case is probably rare.

But what happened to me for a moment was interesting. When I saw those concerns about those ineligible for blood donation, my mind immediately flipped from the creativity mode to something completely opposite. I started scrutinizing a cool one-time event idea as something like a standing policy. I started to forget what the original idea was about (bringing people together under the good cause of blood donation) and began to worry about all sorts of consequences and distant considerations. This is dangerous. But the transition in my mind was so smooth that I didn’t even notice what was happening. Sometimes, you have to consciously fight with yourself to preserve your own creative ideas.

We all have a pattern in the way we think and it is hard to escape from that pattern. Many patterns are common. We tend to exaggerate the negative and overlook the positive. We do not appreciate normalcy until we get into a crisis. We tend to act instead of observe and listen first because acting is often easier than observing and listening. Most of all, we tend to kill our own creativity often as soon as it springs up and start asking questions that are not really relevant. Thinking about long-term consequences and policy implications for an one-time event for example is such a case. We get mired in so many possible concerns and considerations that we get too paralyzed to even act. There are cases in which consequences must be thought out seriously. But even in cases that are not so, we tend to think in the same way.

Breaking this habit is difficult. For example, we tend to think that we can just do things if we really put our mind to it. As this very Aristotelian blog post points out, “Just do it” often doesn’t cut it because our action is the result of our habit as much as our motivation or idea in our mind. So we need to train our mind not to kill our own creativity. We need to practice nurturing our own creativity. We need to say to ourselves and our ideas first “Why Not” instead of “Why.”

*** This blog post has been originally published in ACRL TechConnect 0n August 7, 2012. ***

In my last post, “Applying Game Dynamics to Library Services,” I presented several ideas for applying game dynamics to library services. After the post, I have received a comment like this, which I thought worthwhile to further explore.

What about the risk of gamification – the fact that it can deprive people of internal motivation for serious activities by offering superficial external rewards?

We tend to associate the library with learning, research, scholarship, and something serious. By contrast, games make us think of fun. For this reason, it is natural to worry about a library or any library-related activities such as reading, studying, researching becoming frivolous and trivial by gamification. In an effort to address this concern, I will point out that (a) gamification is a society-wide trend (and as such, highly likely to become not so frivolous after all), (b) what to avoid in gamifying libraries, and (c) what the limit of gamification is in this post. The key to successful gamification is to harness its impressive power while being fully aware of its limit so that you won’t overestimate what you can achieve with it.

Why gamify?

SCVNGR plans to create a game platform as Facebook built a social platform.

Gamification is not just a hot topic in libraries or higher education. It is a much bigger society-wide trend. In a similar way in which Facebook has evolved from a single website to practically ‘the’ social platform and layer of the real world with over 900 million active users as of May 2012, now a game layer is slowly being built on top of the real world. Just as the social layer effectively fused social elements into the world, the game layer brings gaming elements into reality. A game layer that we can compare to Facebook has not yet emerged. Nor is clear how far gamification will penetrate our daily activities. But we can imagine what a semi-universal social platform is going to be like from location-based smartphone apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Instead of building a virtual world for a game, these apps gamify the real world. Our mundane everyday activities in the non-game context turn into gaming opportunities for rewards like badges, points, rankings, and statuses.

But why apply game design elements to the non-game context in the first place? The short answer is that people are more motivated, engaged, and often achieve more in games than in the real world. Why are people better at a game than in real life? It is because games offer an environment intentionally designed to provide people with optimal experience by means of various gaming mechanisms and dynamics. Games make people perform better in the way the real world does not. It was in this context that a game designer and game studies researcher, Jane McGonigal, stated that reality is broken.”1 Gamification aims at extracting those game mechanisms and apply them to reality in order to make the real world experience more interesting and engaging.

Gabe Zichermann’s definition of gamificaion as“the process of game-thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems” expresses the goal of gamification well.2 In this definition lies a good answer to the question of why libraries need to pay attention to games and game dynamics. Game dynamics can raise library users’ level of engagement with library resources, programs, and services. They can help library users to solve problems more effectively and quickly by making the process fun. A good example of such gamification is the NCSU Mobile Scanvenger Hunt, which was described in the previous post here in ACRL TechConnect blog.

What to avoid in library gamification

Since games can induce strong motivation and spur a high level of productivity, it is easy to overestimate the power of game dynamics. Perhaps, everything we do will turn into a game one day and we will be the slaves of omnipresent games that demands ever more motivation and productivity than we can summon! However, not all games are fun or worth playing. Designing good game experiences is nothing but easy.

The first thing to avoid in gamification is poor gamification. Gamification can easily backfire if it is poorly designed. Creating a library game or gamifying certain aspects of a library doesn’t guarantee that it will be successful with its target group. Games that are too challenging or too boring are both poorly designed games. Naturally, it is much more difficult to design and create a good game than a bad one. The quality of the game – i.e. how fun it is – can make or break your library’s gamification project.

Second, one can over-gamify and make everything into a game. This is quite unlikely to happen at a library. But it is still important to remember that people have a limited amount of attention. The more information we have to process and digest, the scarcer our attention becomes. If a library offers many different games or a variety of gamified experiences all at once, users may become overwhelmed and tired. For this reason, in pioneering the application of game dynamics to libraries, the best approach might be to start small and simple.

Third, a game that is organization-centered rather than user-centered can be worse than no game at all. A game with organization-centered design uses external rewards to increase the organization’s bottom line in the short term.3 Games designed this way attempt to control behavior with rewards. Once users feel the game is playing them rather than they are playing the game, however, they are likely to have a negative feeling towards the game and the organization. While a library doesn’t have the goal of maximizing profits like a business, which can easily drive a business to lean towards organization-centered gamification, it is entirely possible for a library to design a game that is too heavily focused on the educational aspect of the game, for example. Such gamification is likely to result in lukewarm responses from library patrons if what they are looking for is fun more than anything else. This doesn’t mean that gamification cannot make a significant contribution to learning. It means that successful gamification should bring out learning as a natural by-product of pleasant and fun experiences, not as a forced outcome.

Harnessing the power of game dynamics

Games are played for fun, and the fun comes from their being ‘not’ real life where one’s action comes with inconvenient real-world consequences. For this reason, when a goal other than fun is imposed on it, the game begins to lose its magical effect on motivation and productivity. It is true that games can achieve amazing things. For example, the game FoldIt revealed the structure of a specific protein that long eluded biochemists.4 But people played this game not because the result would be revolutionary in science but because it was simply fun to play.

It is probably unrealistic to think that every task and project can be turned into a fun game. However, games can be used to make not-so-fun work into something less painful and even enjoyable to some degree, particularly when we lack motivation. In his book, Game Frame, Aaron Dignan cites the story of tennis player Andre Agassi.5 Agassi played a mental game of imagining the tennis ball machine as a black dragon spitting balls in an attempt to smite him. He did not hit 2,500 balls a day purely because it was fun. But by making the grueling practice into a game in his mind and tying the game with his own real-life goal of becoming a successful tennis player, he was able to endure the training and make the progress he needed.

In applying game dynamics to library services and programs, we can take either of two approaches:

The ultimate goal can be simply having fun in some library-related context. There is nothing wrong with this, and at minimum, it will make the library a more friendly and interesting place to patrons.

Or, we can utilize game dynamics to transform a more serious task or project (such as learning how to cite literature for a research paper) into something less painful and even enjoyable.

In this early stage of gamification, it will be useful to remember that gamification doesn’t necessarily require complicated technology or huge investment. You can run a successful game in your library instruction class with a pencil and paper. How about rewarding your library patrons who write to your library’s Facebook page and get most “likes” by other patrons? Or perhaps, a library can surprise and delight the first library patron who checks in your library’s Foursquare or Yelp page by offering a free coffee coupon at the library coffeeshop or simply awarding the Early-Bird badge? In gamification, imagination and creativity can go a long way.

What are your gamification ideas that can engage library patrons and enliven their library experience without huge investment? Share them with us here!

Notes

Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 3. ↩